* Back up

[Mike Davies]

Hi All
Please could someone help. I did a full back up yesterday but have lost all entries from 14/1/2016 to 27/1/2016 yet the baptism and burial images from the parish registers (as entered on Ancestral Sources) appear in the media cache of the back up C:\Users\Mike\Dropbox\Family Historian Projects\Davies Family Tree\Davies Family Tree.fh_data\Media\Church Records, however the individuals to whom these records are for do not appear in the project. As you can see I use Dropbox to co-ordinate between my laptop and desk top
Thanks
Mike Davies

[tatewise]

Mike, I have moved this to the FH General Usage Forum as it is nothing to do with Importing and Exporting to other products.

I presume when you talk about back up you are referring to the FH File > Backup/Restore > Full Backup.

How did you check the back up?
Did you use File > Backup/Restore > Restore Backup or are you just looking inside the .zip file?

Was FH running on both laptop and desktop while you were using AS to add the Baptisms and Burials?
If so, maybe the PC on which AS was not used did not update its Project, and then you later used that Project, which via DropBox would become the master.

Are the FH Media records (not the files) for the new Church Records also missing as well as the new Events and Sources?

I don't think the AS Backups will help, unless you closed and re-opened AS several times. In which case its latest Backup should recover all except the last AS session.

Maybe DropBox users will be able to say if its version history might hold the required Gedcom file.

[Mike Davies]

Thanks for your swift reply Mike. I had been working on my desk top at my desk for several days and had added 14 new individual records via AS with the associated church records, with FH open on the desktop I opened my laptop to show the family the latest discoveries only to find that the records were not showing. I then went back to the desktop to close FH and was prompted to backup so did a full backup. After a while I re-opened the laptop but the new records weren't there so I re-opened the desktop only to find that they weren't there either but that the church record images were in the media folder. I have searched through the backups in Dropbox and on the C drive and have found the backup but when I open it the records still aren't there.

[tatewise]

I suspect what you describe is the cause of the problem.

Maybe you have switched of the Autosave every 5 minutes or set it to a longer interval.

But until you Save in FH on the desktop the Gedcom file won't be saved and wend its way via DropBox to laptop.

You then had both copies of FH open at the same time on the two PC, which is not only dangerous regarding DropBox synch, but also infringes your FH licence terms.

I think, there would then have been a race hazard as to which copy of the Gedcom is updated last - the desktop version or the laptop version. Clearly, the laptop won! The Media files would have made it across because there were no such files on the laptop to contradict them.

When FH is open, and AS updates the Gedcom file, then FH notices the change and raises a message asking to update its database. If both copies of FH are open on desktop and laptop, then that same message should occur on FH that isn't being changed.

Unless a DropBox expert can offer any further advice, I suspect you will have to put the loss down to experience, and don't run both FH together in future.

[ColeValleyGirl]

In the DropBox folder, if two PCs are updating the same file at the same time, there will be files with 'conflicted copy' in the title -- are there any such files?

[Mike Davies]

Hi Helen & Mike thanks for your replies. I do have conflicting files but not for the one on 27/1/2016

Snip of screen

FH problem 1 Jan 27 2016.JPG (81.25 KiB) Viewed 5325 times

Mike you are probably right but I dont understand how the images associated with the lost individuals are still there but not their records. I have been able to identify the lost individual record IDs from AS logs so can rebuild to match the media saved in the project.
Hope this makes sense
Mike

[tatewise]

Image files are present because, as I said, there was no conflict with them. They were created by AS on the desktop and flowed into DropBox and across to the laptop, where there was nothing to stop them.

Whereas, the Gedcom file existed on both PC and DropBox beforehand. The fact that there are earlier conflict Gedcom files, suggests that FH &/or AS are being run on both PC together.

On reflection, it would have been AS that updatd the Gedcom file first when the Save command was used. That should have caused the desktop FH to raise the message saying the Gedcom had been changed by another program and did you want to load that change. Do you remember that message, and is it possible that you declined to load the change by mistake?

[Mike Davies]

Thanks Mike I now understand about the images and will make sure that FH is only open on one machine at a time. I usually go straight back to FH after saving on AS and as far as I know always accept the update of FH but as my sons keep telling me I suffer from fat finger syndrome so may have declined by mistake.
Thanks for all your help
Mike